Panel in Princeton borough offers perspective on job crisis and what voters can do

PRINCETON BOROUGH — A national unemployment rate hovering around 9 percent is bad enough, but the jobless situation in Newark, where unemployment rates in some wards reach 70 percent, is “disastrous,” said Larry Hamm, president of People’s Organization for Progress.

For Princeton University economist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, who argued that the problem of unemployment and its solutions are well-understood, the fact that “enormous suffering” like that in Newark continues is “surreal.”

Hamm, Krugman and Carol Gay, president of the New Jersey Industrial Union Council, spoke Sunday on the sources of the jobs crisis and what voters can do. The panel discussion was hosted by the Mid-Jersey MoveOn Council at Princeton’s Nassau Presbyterian Church.

“It’s not a mystery why it’s happening and it’s not a mystery how to solve it,” Krugman said. He proposed debt-forgiveness programs and mortgage-principal reductions to lift the burden of consumer debt, with government spending picking up the slack until debt programs take effect.

Hamm and Gay called for similar measures, but said job creation must be the first priority.

“When you go into the main entrance of Newark’s post office, people are stationed like sentinels begging for money, begging for food,” Hamm said. He and Gay believe the proposed American Jobs Act is not bold enough and argued for more government-funded infrastructure and “green energy” projects. But with government focused on reducing deficit spending, Krugman said, those programs are not popular.

“There’s been a hijacking of the economic crisis on behalf of an agenda that’s exactly the contrary of the problems we have,” Krugman said. “It’s an agenda that would make America more unequal, and make our society, which is uniquely brutal and harsh by the standards of advanced countries, even more brutal and harsh.”

Gay rejected the argument that the government lacks the money for a more ambitious job creation program.

“We know the top 1 percent and corporations have amassed wealth and are hoarding trillions. The government cannot get us out of the jobs crisis without raising revenue, which means they’ve got to raise taxes on the super-wealthy,” she said.

Krugman doesn’t give legislative solutions much hope until the 2012 election, but all three said the Occupy Wall Street protests give a reason for optimism.

“The state of discussion was so surreal, the emperor had no clothes, yet no one was saying it,” Krugman said. “And then a fairly ragtag group started camping out in a few parks in major cities, and it’s like the country woke up.”

Hamm, who has been leading People’s Organization for Progress in daily protests in Newark since June 27, likened their protest and the Occupy Wall Street protests to the Civil Rights Movement decades ago, and he pledged to continue the demonstrations at least as long as the 381-day-long Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott that started in December 1955.

“We must build a national movement for jobs, but not only for jobs, we must build a national movement for transformation, as Dr. King said, for the radical transformation of our socioeconomic system,” Hamm said, referring to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the slain civil rights leader.

Several audience members participated in Occupy Wall Street-inspired protests throughout New Jersey, but U.S. Rep. Rush Holt (D-12th Dist.) also attended and praised the group’s “constructive action.”
“Optimism is not impractical. It is very much what we need at this point,” Holt said.
However, Hamm warned that protests won’t change things unless it translates to broader action and votes.

“Occupy Wall Street has changed the conversation, at least for a minute, but the opposition is going to try to change it back,” Hamm said. “It’s helping stimulate our voting base, but we’re going to need an even bigger turnout in 2012 than we had in 2008.”